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Prince Andrew invokes Epstein settlement loophole to torpedo accuser’s suit

“That phrase has to be given meaning,” attorneys for Prince Andrew argued in New York federal court on Tuesday, referring to the “other potential defendants” released from liability in the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's 13-year-old settlement with Virginia Giuffre.

MANHATTAN (CN) — Relying on the language of a newly unsealed settlement agreement, attorneys for the U.K.'s Prince Andrew urged a New York federal judge Tuesday to bury sexual battery claims against the royal because he qualifies as a “potential defendant” that the deal would shield from liability.

Even though Queen Elizabeth's second son denies Virginia Giuffre's claim that he assaulted her, Andrew's defense team says that the $500,000 settlement Giuffre reached with Jeffrey Epstein from 2009 contains a release of Epstein-related liability for “Other Potential Defendants."

“That phrase has to be given meaning and Ms. Giuffre and her legal team have not ascribed any other potential reasonable meaning to ‘other potential defendants’,” Prince Andrew’s attorney, Andrew Brettler, said during a one-hour video conference Tuesday morning.

“It must go beyond Mr. Epstein or this broad category that the head football coach of the University of Kansas could fit in to,” Brettler said.

Giuffre sued the prince in August, claimed that he abused her on multiple occasions in 2001 when she was a 17-year-old victim of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's sex trafficking ring. Epstein famously died in jail ahead of a federal trial on related charges, but Maxwell was convicted late last month.

Prince Andrew’s attorneys allege that Giuffre waived her right to sue in the 2009 settlement release, unsealed only a day earlier, which defines Epstein and “his agent(s), attorney(s), predecessor(s), successor(s), heir(s), administrator(s), assign(s) and/or employee(s)” as the "Second Parties” of the settlement agreement, but additionally includes a provision to release "any other person or entity who could have been included as a potential defendant.”

During Tuesday’s remote hearing, Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan prodded counsel for both parties as to who would be granted release from liability as a “potential defendant.”

“The word ‘potential’ must have meant something, and if there’s no meaning, then it meant nothing,” the Clinton-appointed judge said.

Judge Kaplan did not make a ruling on the motion to dismiss on Tuesday morning, but promised a decision “pretty soon,” and denied Prince Andrew’s request for a stay of discovery in the interim.

Last month, the judge said a trial in Giuffre's lawsuit against the prince could occur between September and December 2022.

Brettler attempted to qualify Prince Andrew to the judge as one of the other "potential defendants" covered by the Epstein settlement. "Someone is not named as a defendant but could have been by virtue of the allegations that Ms. Giuffre was aware of at the time and had articulated, at least in broad strokes, in her complaint to include Prince Andrew," the British royal's attorney explained.

“I think that is unquestionable that Prince Andrew could have been sued in the 2009 Florida action. He was not, and therefore he was a potential defendant and releasee under the 2009 settlement agreement by unambiguous terms,” Brettler said.

“So this would include the Sultan of Brunei too,” asked Judge Kaplan.

“If there were allegations against the Sultan of Brunei,” Brettler responded, “then absolutely it would. Certainly it is evidenced by the fact that she did, in fact, intend to dismiss release Professor Dershowitz from any liability.”

Giuffre has been entangled for years in a separate civil defamation battle in the district with Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor emeritus. She settled a defamation suit against Maxwell in 2017 and did not testify at Maxwell's recent trial in the Southern District of New York.

Giuffre’s attorney David Boies told the judge Tuesday that only the late Epstein has the power to assert release under the contract for third parties, such as Prince Andrew.

“What the court is saying, the parties actually explicitly agreed that any third party beneficiary rights would have to be asserted by the parties of the contract and not by a potential defendant,” Boies said.

Judge Kaplan appeared to agree with the lawyer's argument.

Beyond seeking Prince Andrew’s immunity under the settlement deal, Brettler also demanded that Giuffre’s attorneys provide more sufficient detail to the claims of her allegations.

“Ms. Giuffre needs to lock herself into a story now, not some time in the future after she conducts discovery and figures out where the chips may fall, she needs to allege today, she needs to allege in her complaint against Prince Andrew when he supposedly abused her,” the attorney said on Tuesday. “Even a date, a month, we would settle for a year. ... We don’t even have a time, a date, a location other than an apartment. We don’t know when this was. And Ms. Giuffre doesn’t articulate what supposedly happened to her at the hands of Prince Andrew.”

Judge Kaplan swiftly shot down the request for those supplement particulars.

“With all due respect, Mr. Brettler, that’s not a dog that’s going to hunt here,” the judge said. ”She has no obligation to do that in the complaint, I’ll tell you that straight out right now, it’s not going to happen. You have every right to that information when the parties engage in discovery.”

In court filings last week, Prince Andrew’s attorneys also asked Judge Kaplan to order Giuffre to respond to written legal requests about her residency and submit to a two-hour deposition on the issue.

The lawyers wrote that Giuffre has an Australian driver's license and was living in a $1.9 million home in Perth, western Australia, where she has been raising three children with her husband, who is Australian.

“Even if Ms. Giuffre’s Australian domicile could not be established as early as October 2015, there can be no real dispute that she was permanently living there with an intent to remain there as of 2019 — still two years before she filed this action against Prince Andrew,” the lawyers wrote.

They said the timing of Giuffre's registration to vote in Colorado prior to filing the lawsuit against the prince was “suspicious and appears to be a calculated move in an effort to support her specious claim of citizenship in Colorado despite having moved to Australia at least a year (if not four years) earlier.”

Attorneys for Prince Andrew previously asked Judge Kaplan to throw out Giuffre’s lawsuit in the fall, saying the prince “never sexually abused or assaulted” Giuffre and they believed she sued Andrew “to achieve another payday at his expense and at the expense of those closest to him.”

A trove of Epstein-related documents unsealed by order of the Second Circuit in August 2019 depicted the spectrum of powerful men embroiled in Epstein’s international sex ring as recalled by Giuffre.

“Giuffre also alleged she was ‘forced’ to have sex with Dershowitz, ‘model scout’ Jean Luc Brunel, and ‘many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders,” the late U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet wrote in a formerly sealed 2017 opinion.

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